Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
What did de Groot find?
Masters did not always search deeper in simple measures; they saw better positions. Perception as expertise.
How much does practice explain in games?
Macnamara et al. 2014: about 26% in their games coding — minority, largest among their bands.
Were the Polgárs a proof of nurture?
László Polgár’s project produced three elite players, including Judit. It is a powerful family experiment, not a proof that any child can be world number one.
Is go the same file as chess?
Shared search and pattern; different aesthetics and institutions (Japan/Korea/China houses).
Does chess make you smarter at life?
Near transfer to similar search tasks is likelier than far transfer to every decision. “Chess in schools raises IQ” is a weaker claim.
The people below are a history set for strategic talent, diverse in country and gender, not a league table.
Years and countries are real. “Why” is a file label, not a rank. No group IQ story is licensed by any of these lives.
Exemplars
- Adriaan de Groot 1914–2006 · Netherlands
Chess in the lab Thought and Choice in Chess made perception the finding.
- Herbert Simon 1916–2001 · United States
Chunking and expertise With Chase, the pattern-vocabulary paper (1973).
- Judit Polgár 1976– · Hungary
Elite against folklore The strongest woman player in the open file — a family experiment’s public result.
- José Raúl Capablanca 1888–1942 · Cuba
Positional clarity A style often mis-told as “effortless gift”; he still studied a tradition.
- Vera Menchik 1906–1944 · Russia / United Kingdom
First women’s world champion A professional in a hostile ecosystem, not a side category of talent.
- Go Seigen 1914–2014 · China / Japan
Modern go’s shaper A trans-national house career that remade opening theory.
- Hou Yifan 1994– · China
Contemporary elite A state-supported go/chess-era prodigy path in a different game’s neighbour culture — here, chess’s public face in China.
- Garry Kasparov 1963– · Azerbaijan / Russia
Human versus machine era Baku training plus the 1997 Deep Blue match as a talent-history marker.
Strategic talent: eight lives, not a ranking. Read them as files, not as a hierarchy of peoples.
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